{"id":73499,"date":"2013-03-01T09:38:36","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T14:38:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=73499"},"modified":"2013-03-07T10:03:09","modified_gmt":"2013-03-07T15:03:09","slug":"human-rights-scholar-much-more-to-be-done","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2013\/03\/human-rights-scholar-much-more-to-be-done\/","title":{"rendered":"Human Rights Scholar: \u2018Much More to Be Done\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"John<\/a>
John G. Ruggie, left, the former U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, President Susan Herbst, and former U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center before the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The international human rights scholar who developed the core principles endorsed by the United Nations for international corporations to protect human rights in the conduct of their business says much more work will be needed to implement those guidelines.<\/p>\n

Addressing an audience of students, international experts in human rights, and government officials, John G. Ruggie of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard reflected upon his six-year effort to develop what are known as the \u201cRuggie Principles\u201d while delivering the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center on Thursday.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the results we have today are positive,\u201d Ruggie said. \u201cWhen I presented the Guiding Principles to the U.N. Human Rights Council, I said I am under no illusion even with this endorsement that this will solve all human rights and business challenges. It\u2019s not going to bring them to an end. But it is the end of the beginning. For the first time, we now have a common foundation on which to build. We have a common understanding what the minimum standards ought to be for states and for governments. There is much more to be done. I am the first to insist that much more should be done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ruggie delivered his remarks before an audience that also included representatives of global business, government officials, and scholars who will meet today at the Dodd Research Center in a roundtable discussion on how to implement the \u201cGuiding Principles for Business and Human Rights\u201d adopted by the U.N.<\/p>\n

A wide range of actors<\/strong><\/p>\n

In tracing the history of his work developing the principles while serving as the U.N. Secretary-General\u2019s Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, Ruggie said he faced a formidable task in trying to affect the conduct of 193 sovereign states, 80,000 multinational corporations with 800,000 subsidiaries, and millions of their suppliers.<\/p>\n

\u201cHerding cats is an insufficient metaphor,\u201d he said, drawing laughter. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t begin to describe the challenge of this situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"John<\/a>
John G. Ruggie of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, speaks about his work developing the Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He said the key to formulating guidelines that could be acceptable to such a wide range of actors on a global stage was to involve as many of them as possible in a process that included 47 international consultations, with groups ranging from indigenous people in South America and sweat shop workers in Asia, to Russian businessmen and numerous governments around the world, all in an attempt to generate a consensus behind a set of core ideas for governments and businesses to promote, protect, and advance the course of human rights.<\/p>\n

While many global issues are resolved using treaties among nations, Ruggie said those negotiated agreements can take years. He cited the \u201cDeclaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples\u201d adopted by the U. N. General Assembly in 2007, which took 26 years to complete.<\/p>\n

Ruggie said he wanted to find what he described as \u201ca more heterodox solution,\u201d one that involved all of the interested parties who would be affected by the Guiding Principles.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a problem that is going to be solved by governments alone, business alone, or civil society actors alone,\u201d he said. \u201cAll of them have important contributions to make to an overall solution. They need to be drawn together. Left to themselves, they\u2019re going off in different directions … we spent as much time promoting the Guiding Principles as developing them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Core components<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ultimately, Ruggie\u2019s work resulted in the three core components of the guidelines: The state\u2019s duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business; corporate responsibility to respect human rights; and greater access by victims to effective remedy, both judicial and non-judicial.<\/p>\n

He said there are three specific areas to address to implement the guidelines on a global scale:<\/p>\n

Capacity building.<\/strong> Supporting small and medium-sized enterprises, supporting particularly small developing countries, to help build the capacity to act on the things we agree should be done. \u201cWe underestimate how important lack of capacity is for both countries and business to do the right thing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Corporate law and securities regulation.<\/strong> Establishing the concept of \u201ccorporate culture.\u201d Ruggie cited Australian criminal law, under which a company can be held liable if its corporate culture was to direct, encourage, or tolerate wrongdoing by an employee, but only the employee could be tried if there was a set of systems in place that clearly discouraged this behavior.<\/p>\n

International law should recognize corporate liability.<\/strong> \u201cThe international community itself through an intergovernmental process needs to establish once and for all that not only natural persons can commit crimes against humanity, but legal persons can also,\u201d he said. \u201cWe no longer accept the idea that sovereignty can be used as a shield behind which governments can commit abuses against people. Surely the corporate form should not be a shield either for allegations or for abuses of conduct that may amount to internationally recognized crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Former U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd introduced Ruggie before the lecture. The Thomas J. Dodd Research Center is named for his father, a U.S. Senator and Member of the House of Representatives who served as a prosecutor during the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. During a news conference earlier in the day Dodd, now chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America Inc., spoke about his father\u2019s legacy living on at the University.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy father\u2019s been gone many, many years but his epiphany as a public person and as a human being occurred during an 18-month period in a destroyed city in Nuremberg,\u201d he said. \u201cHis life was never the same thereafter. Everything he did after that in many ways was seen through the prism of the Nuremberg experience. While he was long gone when this Center was established, I like to think he\u2019d be very much supportive of the idea we\u2019re gathering today to talk about, this subject matter is something I think he would have endorsed wholeheartedly. I\u2019m pleased there\u2019s a place that exists that bears his name, committed to an issue that almost 70 years ago he became an evangelist for \u2013 that is, the human rights of people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The U.N.-endorsed principles to guide states and corporations in respecting human rights are just a beginning, said the scholar who developed them, John Ruggie, speaking at the Dodd Center.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":73512,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[55],"class_list":["post-73499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-01 07:42:10","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73499"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73897,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73499\/revisions\/73897"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/73512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73499"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=73499"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=73499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}